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Questions about Sandbox
Creatorzim
Member UncommonPosts: 274
So a video got posted yesterday about how we should have more Sandbox MMOs. Im fine with that not a problem.
When he talked about it he talked about Eve, how its endless. Players will never run out of content. Amazing.
But this is PVP. How does a company make an endless sandbox MMO for PVE? He said the problem with theme park is that content is being processed faster than devs can create it. Well how would any company make a PVE game endless? Not all people want to do just PVP constantly. Most in fact.
The whole point of the video was that WoW destroyed the MMO community because everyone started making theme parks. and left Sandbox games to rot.
It just got me thinking. Sandbox rpgs today dont have anything special that makes them endless over a theme park RPG.
Comments
Player conflict (PVP in its infinite forms) makes it infinite because no two fights will ever be the same... and no you cannot get a multiplayer sandbox without player interactions of a more negative manner because put simply a sandbox does not work without that conflict, there's too little space for all the players and you end up with scenes like in some of the PVE servers on Wurm where houses just are everywhere you can possibly put them.
Do not I do not imply FFA PVP in what I said above though its mechanics and player constricted brother PVP with consequences is implied.
I understand how PVP is infinite. I dont understand how it would work for a PVE game instead. Im mostly critiqueing the video that was passed around but didnt want to start that thread up again and thought this could be a much more defined question that could get some interesting thoughts if I started a new thread myself.
Can there be a infinite storyline for PVE players without the devs pushing out expansions and updates that would satisfy our hunger. But unless you enjoy PVP I dont see how any RPG can have infinite content that would satisfy customers. That is what was said was wrong with MMOs today is that devs cant produce enough content for gamers and a move to sandbox needs to happen to fix this.
I cant understand how this could be possible. Does someone know a way this could work in the future?
You would need a living world... highly advanced AI...hell probably actual AI for a PVE RPG to be infinite otherwise only PVP RPGs can be infinite (not definitely but could).
Thats the only way I could think that it would work as well. I just dont understand why the creator was attacking themepark. I feel like it does what it does well and succeeds where it needs to.
Sandbox games do what they do and succeed where they need to.
Eve did what it needed to to succeed but when its only a PVP came that doesnt excite the rest of us. Yes its infinite, so is Minecraft. Still not going to play either of those games. They have no story and thats what I enjoy about games.
You dont have to blame games like WoW for destroying sandbox gaming because they were successful. I would love to play something that had an infinite story but until someone comes up with that idea ill stick to what I have.
It takes synergy between people and npcs.
You do it by giving players control of NPC's and letting players created the dungeons, raids, and questing, all while keeping open world pvp.
Mix Kingdom Under Fire + The Repopulation + Starcraft/Warcraft RTS's = MMORPGRTS Sandbox = Amazing game with endless PVE and PVP, and plenty of time for dev teams to continue adding to the mix.
It's really a game that the players are forced to roll with the punches rather than go to the forums and complain unil the dev team gives them free stuff. Something in game a player doesn't like? Well then they have the option to fix it because there is so much at their disposal.
The one hurdle? Most players won't have the brain power to actually impact the game as they imagine. Dedicated hardcore players will, and that crafty thinker will.
The motivation? Determining whether you're crafty enough, hardcore enough, creative enough to do something epic in game that becomes part of the games history or gaming history in general.
Well... you kinda goofed when you said PVP games do not have stories....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrYe_4vHzgE
They just are emergent, wholly unscripted and if you have my luck: Usually the awesome ones happen to other people for a long, long time before you realize you make the game and just find a good group of people to derp around with (highlights in my case include: 5 ships jumping onto a bait proteus and 15 hostile ships jumping onto them, corp leeroy jumping in to engage hostiles and me going in after him with several others following suit... derps were had in that one but we did bag a fairly expensive ship, etc,etc).
Well couldnt you just do that for any game? Look at Red Vs Blue. Making your own story is different then having a story.
As pointed out, it woudl take incredibly advanced AI. This is because combat is at the center of games, so you either fight teh AI or other players.
PVP is easy. Develop the system, give them tools, balance it as much as possible, and have at it.
PVE is about figuring out the patterns. When you beat a boss, it feels "complete", and if you keep running it over and over, you'll end up mastering it. It's simply impossible to create infinite, evolving scenarios for scripted AI.
The only solution i can imagine, will me "modding", in way. Like you said OP, it's about the story. Storytelling, variety of enemies and creatures, npc charcters, etc, all of these are what pve draws strenght from.If players had tools that allowed them to create more along side the devs, the players would create their own pve content.
But this is still very, very difficult and early. Just look at Neverwinter's Foundry. It's probably one of the best examples,and it's probably not enough. Also, more instancing, phasing and seperation would be necessary to use to it's full extent.
After all, most challenging and intersting AI situations occur in "private" areas, not where you get random people coming in.
Sometimes i wonder, if PVE focused titles will keep shrinking into single player-ish co-op like titles to use story and such to better extent, while PVP will grow more into large, seamless, open world warfare (of course, there'll always be MOBAS, FPS, ETC).
That's what i imagine the future might be, specially looking at how ESO organizes PVE (phased, overflow, zones, etc) and PVP (seasmless in Cyrodiil, large and fixed campaign in a server like structure).
So, the "PVE sandbox" is still a very tricky beast to make, since combat rules gaming and mmos. Fine for personally, since i've come to love pvp over pve recently because of these very same limitations.
Red vs Blue is a machinima, the above link is a retelling of the story of conflict between The Rooks and their adversaries with all the drama relayed. If you look up the great war eve on youtube you get other videos. These videos are telling real stories lived not written, understand the difference? (also do note the videos often relay the history of one side, look up the other side for a full view, kind of like how real world history works)
It would have to be a game with big fokus on crafting, housing, gathering, farming, entertaining, trading, politics and so on. Sort of an advanced sims. For a 100% pve sandbox game you just have to fokus on RP and move away from the fights.
If done right i might even play a game like that.
One thing I thought about is Neverwinter...I havent really looked too much in it but that could work wouldnt it. People make dungeons in Neverwinter for others to play. All you would have to do is to be able to tell a story some how with it, Have players input their own voice acting. You have the making for endless adventures and stories. That works with something like DnD since its doesnt have such a structured Lore and has room for tons of stuff. Not sure how it would work for things like WoW, Star Wars, etc where they have Lore that cant be changed and essentially written in stone. Would be really interesting to see if people were given the tools how creative they could be to create content for everyone.
I think you just invented Minecraft...lol
Only way I see that endless pve sandbox happening is ( yes you guessed it right) generators. I won't even mention "if it is pve then it is not a sandox bla bla" thing. In my opinion people will get used to pve sandboxes as more and more sandbox mmos are released.
As for generators I only know a handful of games that uses them and most of them are single player games. Developers are probably avoiding generators for mmos because if you do not have a fine selection of separate "parts" in generators repetition starts to kick in really quick.
But despite their current flaws generators can be really useful. Best example I can think of is Civilization series. It is probably the only game where you can experience true exploration. You literally have no idea what the world looks like before you click play! That also counters "too much information to the slightest detail about every zone/ quest /item /npc on the internet" problem. There will still be shortcuts though.
Or a game with permanent terraforming providing an everchanging landscape can fresh things up a bit, but it probably won't offer much in terms of content to play. Wurm Online and and Landmark have this feature and it is really nice to login and find a phallic shaped building right next to your cozy cottage.(Not!)
What video? Do you have a link?
Eve is a lol analogy because it is 95++% null space,anyone can make a bunch of null space.Also as pointed out by the OP pvp is not content that is simply flagging every ship for attack.
Landmark is a true example of a sandbox and aside form other Minecraft type games,really the ONLY real sandbox type games.However this is only a very small start into the Sandbox world we are a long way away from being 100% a Sandbox.Unreal Tournament was the FIRST true Sandbox because they gave the players the engine the tools and the ability to mod it anyway they wanted
You won't have a true sandbox mmorpg because players cannot create everything,there is no database large enough or fast enough to handle that kind of load.That is why a game like UT99 could pull it off because those are small player run servers so only has to cater to a few clients.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Life is Feudal is attempting to allow players to create everything except the actual initial world creation.
Pvp gives a sandbox its soul.
Life IS Feudal
Sandbox sounds good on paper but developers can't make it work. Yeah sure make a game where people can make their own stories via real time changing interaction with the world.. That would be awesome. But the reality is pretty limited in video games. Computers are dumb. The creativity of an AI is non-existent compared to a human being. So the matrix like game that people want is just not happening.
And the moment it does happen AAA developers will move in and create awesome big budget games. Right now we get... Landmark..
PvE is fundamentally about building up. There are a wide variety of different things one can build up. Some of them are very well suited to sandboxes, such as building up property ownership, crafting abilities, farming/ranching accomplishments, and visual customizations of characters. Some don't really fit in a pure sandbox, such as building up personal relationships with NPCs, building up rank within NPC factions, and building up combat level against increasingly difficult monsters. These could all fit together happily in a hybrid sandpark game, which would also have room for minigames. I could show you a design for a game like that. It's not going to be an infinite game though.
The issue with building up is that the game has to recognize what you build, or it doesn't feel meaningful. And it's easiest for the game to recognize what you build in the context of crafting specific recipes, completing specific collections, completing quest chains and dungeons, and that kind of pre-created content. And at that point it becomes a money issue; how much content can you afford to create before launching the game, and how much content per month can you afford to create after that? It's generally regarded to be economically impossible to create enough content that hardcore players can play for a year without running out. You might amass that much content over several years of updates, but that doesn't do much good for the people who started playing when the game was launched.
Player-created content doesn't seem to be a great answer. Creating tools that enable unskilled players to create high-quality content is costly, and so is vetting that content for inclusion in the game; if you don't vet it the average quality is going to be crap.
[quote] Originally posted by Saxx0n
No offense intended, but to me a PvP soul is ugly.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
lol I thought your sig was the question you were talking about...Realized it wasnt. Thank you though. I just think its weird how everyone says the future is Sandbox but a Sandbox will run into the same problems, at least as far as I could see, that theme parks will with PVE content. Content will be rushed through by some people and new content will never be good enough for how hungry the players are.
It seem like you fusion the concepts while compare the 2 kind of design .
In themepark contents a book that you rush through to see the end .
in so call .., uhm ... sandbox (i still confuse about this term since there are a lot things build up around it) ,
PVE are part to gather materials , or simple enjoy beat up the mobs .
If you mean contents are " *sob* plz help me " task that come from NPC then i don't think it will endless.
Unless like other post said , you need super AI .
Or large database , because that kind of story are pretty same type , difference text thought .
Possible to recreate simple task , but not *sob* pre wrote stories .
if you prefer "chosen one" type story that every NPCs scream about you and millions other player are "only chosen one" that going to beat big bad boss then i think it impossible to make that type of endless .
PC can spawn last boss and let every big city put gold reward on his head , but they can't chose you to become chosen one .
Still it possible to get "chosen one" tittle after you beat that boss , but who care you are chosen or not when the boss is gone.